The New York City Department of Transportation wants to hire as a consultant Jan Gehl, who has helped cities like London and Copenhagen create less congested urban areas by taking back the streets from cars – and giving top priority to pedestrians and bicyclists. Jan Gehl is a world-renowned Danish architect who wants to ban [...]Read Post

The Storefront for Art and Architecture is experimenting with a bicycle share program to demonstrate to New Yorkers that bicycling is a viable, and enjoyable, transportation alternative. Several European cities have successful bicycle sharing programs – Paris will shortly be making 10,000 bikes available from 750 stations across the city through a program called Velib.Read Post

An urban planning philosophy often labelled Home Zone or Shared Space has developed over the past three decades and promotes sensitive street design as a way to create more people-friendly environments. “We should learn to build villages in the way they were built in the past,” says Hans Monderman, the Dutch engineer seen as the [...]Read Post

The Silicon Valley cities of Mountain View and Sunnyvale are alike in many ways. But their downtowns offer a study in contrasts because of land use decisions made 30 years ago. Like many suburbs in the 1970s, Sunnyvale approved and subsidized development of a mall as a way of “saving” downtown. It didn’t work out [...]Read Post

After funding the research that helped Jane Jacobs produce her landmark book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” nearly 50 yeas ago, the Rockefeller Foundation has inaugurated the first Jane Jacobs Medals. Barry Benepe, the 79-year-old founder of Greenmarket, will receive the first medal for “lifetime leadership.” Omar Freilla, the 33-year-old founder of [...]Read Post

Bogota, Colombia, has turned itself around by focusing on using the public realm to promote the greatest amount of happiness. First stop? Car-free days. The city’s campaign to return streets from cars to people is now a model for the world.Read Post

The quality of the typical New York City park is determined largely by whether it is in a wealthy or poor neighborhood, according to a study to be released by a private nonprofit group today. The report also indicated that despite budget increases in recent years, the Parks Department is not doing enough strategic planning [...]Read Post

Seattle’s Occidental Square is making a comeback! The square had long been an empty, dreary, underused space. But recent renovations have brought new pavings, bocce ball courts, and a series of special events that are bringing people back to Occidental Square. Read more about PPS’s involvement in the turnaround. Photo taken by Dan Gonsiorowski Seattlest [...]Read Post

After Toronto’s plan to add bike lanes falls behind schedule, cycling activists paint their own bike lanes. “The city is taking way too long…Why don’t they just paint the bike lanes? People are dying.”Read Post

Local politicians – lawyers among them – will be staging a mock trial Saturday on whether to set free a wooden bench near the Surrey Central SkyTrain and bus loop in Surrey, British Columbia. The idea for the bench trial came about after public spaces guru Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces, toured [...]Read Post